At Home My Way

My family loves those cheesecakes that are no-bake and come as a boxed mix.  We make them normally in the summer when I don't want to heat up the house.  A few weeks ago, back before Rocky, Blizzard #2, 2013 , we had some terrific weather,  weather that was perfect for BBQ hamburgers and no-bake cheesecake.  Mmm... I can just remember now how wonderful it was to sit out on our porch in the swing, smelling that delicious aroma of BBQ as the sun set and enjoying a 75 degree evening.  Missouri is crazy like that.  One week we get 76 degrees in February and the next we can have 26 inches of snow on the ground.  No kidding! I am always on the hunt for something I can make AT HOME MY WAY that will satisfy a family favorite that we typically get from the store or in a box.  One of my favorite resources for homemade everything is Finding Joy in My Kitchen .  Sno-White offers recipes on her blog that are easy to make and dependably scrump...

We woke up to another amazing amount of snow this morning.  We knew it was coming, but... wow!  Twice in six days we got snows totaling 10+ inches each.  Thursday it was Storm "Q" and this morning (Tuesday), "Rocky" came to visit!  This snow is so beautiful because there is so MUCH out there!  It's not even very cold so you can really walk around and just breathe it all in!   Everything in our area is pretty much closed, thankfully, so we are home today enjoying a much appreciated day off from work. While Doug went out to shovel, I put on a pot of coffee and started some breakfast.  This morning I made bacon and our favorite homemade biscuits .  My favorite way to make bacon is to bake it on a broiler pan.  There is no mess, no smoke, no burned spots on the bacon, and no burned ME from popping grease.  It turns out perfect every single time.  You also can pretty much cram it all on ...

This weekend my daughter, Rebecca, wanted to make something "different" to go with our BBQ.  Hey!  If someone wants to cook for me, and I don't have to leave my house?  Bring it on! Rebecca tried this super delicious recipe.  It was wonderful!!  Her dad is very, very picky.  In fact, we made a plain baked potato for him just in case he didn't like it.  But like it?  He did!  He loved it.  He raced home after work on Monday, to gobble down the leftovers. We halved this recipe.  We also varied from the original recipe in that we used instant mashed potatoes.  We made them using water and milk as called for on the box, and omitted the milk from the recipe here.  We also only made half of this recipe since there were only three of us eating.  Half of this recipe would easily feed a family of four, unless you want leftovers and it's so delicious that you might want to make the whole shabang!  You are going to ...

My menu plan for the week is pretty simple.  We ate lots of leftovers last week so I plan to include lots of the items I had planned to use last week for this week's meals. Breakfasts :  Leftover Cinnamon Buns (these are BEYOND delicious so I am posting the recipe today); Yogurt w/ fruit and Perfect Granola Homemade Biscuits Toast w/Homemade Peach Preserves Lunches : Salad with Homemade Ranch Dressing & crusty bread Peanut Butter & Homemade Jelly sandwiches Pizza Hot Pockets Suppers : Ham Steak w/ pinto beans and rice (from the freezer) Taco Tuesday with cheese beans, nachos Chicken & Homemade Noodles Homemade Pizza Spaghetti Sauce NOW... WITHOUT FURTHER ADIEU... the cinnamon buns! They were beyond wonderful!  I was in awe of the beautiful pastry sitting on my plate.  They were as beautiful as any I had ever seen "under glass" in fancy bakeries!  And delicious?  YUM!  I could go on and on... B...

Tonight is homemade pizza night at our house.  I normally like to have some pizza dough in the refrigerator for Friday nights and Saturday lunches.  I know that one of those meals will definitely be pizza.  The most affordable way to eat pizza is AT HOME MY WAY!  The recipe for the dough for making pizza and Homemade Pizza Pockets is "here" and "here" .  (Remember that you can make lots of things using this dough, like Homemade English Muffins , a pizza bread , or even just some simple crusty bread to go with soup.) Sometimes, by the end of the weekend, we've eaten all the pizza we want and there's just a little dabble of dough left, like this: What to do with such a small amount of dough?  Make Homemade Pizza Pockets for the freezer, of course!  You can tailor them to have just the fillings you prefer and later in the week, you will be so glad you have some homemade goodness in your freezer for lunches on the run!    I'...

Remember when I made Homemade Brown Sugar the other day?  I promised the recipe for Peanut Butter Cookies.  Well, after that, the attack of the stomach flu landed on me and I didn't get recipe that posted.  Having just finished the last of these delicious Soft Peanut Butter Cookies, I remembered that I needed to post the recipe. This recipe uses shortening.  I rarely buy or use shortening but I confess that I do use shortening when it comes to making soft cookies.  I normally make Chocolate Chip Cookies and use shortening (not butter-flavored, just regular).  I find that when I use butter, I just cannot get soft cookies like I can with using shortening.  The other night I was pinning and pinning on Pinterest and ran across a simple, delicious recipe and scrumptious picture for peanut butter cookies.  Hmmm!  Sometimes I forget to make this simple, old fashioned cookie.  Why?  I don't know.  Truly they are never up...

We ran out of chocolate syrup several weeks ago.  Wanting ice cream with chocolate syrup, I made some instead of running out to the store. It turned out just perfect.  I found this recipe at the Hillbilly Housewife site.  Here's her link .  It's easy to do and fast!  You only cook it for 3 minutes and I had all of the ingredients needed since it only requires cocoa, sugar, water, salt & vanilla.  The only hard part was waiting on it to cool. I store mine in a glass jar but you could refill you old chocolate syrup bottle and your family would never know the difference.  It passed the "Doug" test and that's all our family needs ha!  I made a delicious glass of chocolate milk with it and also made myself a big honkin' chocolate sundae with peanuts for dessert the other night.  It's mighty fine stuff! Here's how I made Homemade Chocolate Syrup AT HOME MY WAY: Homemade Chocolate Syrup  1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa ...

I found a recipe for Homemade Bagels making the dough in the bread machine.  I knew I had to try it! I love my bread machine!  I think lots of people have these little appliances and don't use them.  Get your bread machine out of the cabinet!  They are so wonderful!  I rarely bake anything in mine, but I DO use it for all the mixing and timing.  That saves lots of steps.  But what I most like is that anything you mix in the bread machine is "managable".  There are no huge day-long baking adventures created with one batch of dough in a bread machine. This little recipe made 8 bagels!  Perfectly managable.  Especially for a night when I had worked all day, came home to make supper, and wanted to do try something new like making bagels.  I have tried making bagels before but never with this much success.  These are perfect!!!! These bagels are chewy, with a crispy crust, but light inside!  I loved them!...